LONDON — London’s Heathrow Airport announced Saturday morning that it is “open and fully operational” and flights have resumed after a fire at an electrical substation knocked out power to Europe’s busiest hub.
“Flights have resumed at Heathrow, and we are open and fully operational,” Heathrow Airport said on X. “Teams across the airport continue to do everything they can to support passengers impacted by yesterday’s outage at an off-airport power substation.”
A Heathrow spokesperson said that hundreds of additional colleagues are on hand in their terminals on Saturday and that the airport has added flights Saturday’s schedule to facilitate an extra 10,000 passengers travelling through the airport.
“Power supplies have been restored to all customers connected to our North Hyde substation, including Heathrow, allowing operations to resume at the airport. We are now implementing measures to help further improve the resilience levels of our network,” read a statement from the U.K.’s National Grid concerning the fire at North Hyde Substation which caused the closure of Heathrow on Friday.
“We are deeply sorry for the disruption caused and are continuing to work closely with the government, Heathrow and the police to understand the cause of the incident,” the statement continued.
A passenger plane makes its landing approach to Heathrow International Airport, a day after a fire at a nearby electrical substation wiped out power at the airport, near London, Britain, March 22, 2025.
Carlos Jasso/Reuters
An analysis said as many as 290,000 passengers were expected to be impacted by the closure Friday, according to Cirium, an aviation analytics company. There were 669 flights scheduled to depart to Heathrow on Friday, with 145,836 seats, according to Cirium. The fire could affect another 270,000 passengers on Saturday, too, Cirium said.
The cause of the fire is still not known and currently under investigation but authorities have confirmed that they are not treating the blaze as suspicious.
“After initial assessment, we are not treating this incident as suspicious, although enquiries do remain ongoing,” a statement from London’s Metropolitan Police said. Because of the location of the substation “and the impact this incident has had on critical national infrastructure,” the Met’s Counter Terrorism Command was leading the investigation, authorities said.
ABC News’ Morgan Winsor and Mike Trew contributed to the report.
